online: 7 july 2006
modified: 1, 2, 7 july 2006

30 june 2006 a summer evening in history


20:07 ...clear sky, three aircraft (quite close together in the stratosphere), one wispy cloud (quite low)... few people here this evening... the shadow of my head and shoulders is projected by the setting sun on the bare earth of a footpath...

...to be alive and functioning here and now is indeed splendid (as it is in any time or place)...

...i pause to drink water (to which i added what's left of some herbal medicine) and i eat a small banana (from the Windward Islands) and i can see two swans apparently eating the duckweed that covers pond 2 today...

...two pigeons approach along the path towards the shadow picture of my upper body which has shifted to nearby grass and undergrowth where it ceases to be recognisable for lack of continuous surface... (natural cinema disintegrates)



20:42 at the tumulus:
clear air this evening, the east wind is dry but not polluted with smog (as it probably would be if the wind were from the southeast, coming from the Rhur)... i can see clearly the low hills beyond southeast London...

...as i walked up Parliament Hill i enjoyed for the nth time the sight of tall treetops growing beyond the horizon which was closer than they were... every time i see this i am struck by its magical look - as it were a scene in a play or a movie...



...after which he looks back at what happens when he crosses the horizon of thought and finds himself no longer in the physical landscape but in history... the city becomes abstract, as does the physiography of nature... while the supposed reality of thought and language takes its place...

...and then, in this restoration of imagined power, the best and worst of history becomes evident...

the leviathan of absolute rule and the utopia of idealism combine into an eruption of thought and possibility in which the world becomes a fiction that can be reconceived as good or evil... for no dualism can be dismissed and no unity can be imposed...
...these words come together experimentally as the thoughts acquire apparent reality while the politics remain unformed,
...for this is the non-determinism of thought in the absence of sense and sublime hope for what is good in the tumult of life and death... and in the expected collapse of evolution (or its replacement by book worship)...
and for the moment, perhaps infinite, the truth remains a fiction from which no one can return...
...and as the earth rotates and the thoughts reassemble into a recurring normality the words proceed in darkness dispelled by electricity and the divisions between people become less as the hierarchies melt into old stories of civility and unrest... from which cometh the help menu, or automated teacher and the education of everyone... (these necessary fictions)


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